A typical local retail pharmacy fills thousands of prescription orders per week. Moreover, as the general population ages and new beneficial drugs are introduced, prescription order volumes to be filled at retail pharmacies are expected to double within the next few years. This present and expected increase in order volume places enormous pressure on pharmacists and other pharmacy workers, who strive to fill each order efficiently, accurately and quickly.
Retail pharmacies typically maintain a will-call area that contains filled prescription orders waiting for customer pickup. As the volume of prescription orders filled at a typical retail pharmacies increases, the amount of physical storage needed to hold these filled prescriptions also must necessarily increase. However, most retail pharmacies do not have the ability to expand their available square footage to accommodate a larger storage area. As a result, the will-call pick-up storage areas at many retail pharmacies have become unwieldy and inefficient.
In particular, most retail pharmacies store filled prescription orders on fixed shelves or in storage containers received on fixed bins (collectively referred to as bins herein) that are spaced apart from each other to allow a worker to walk between them to access the bins. Typically, these bins are identified and arranged by a unique alphabetic letter identifier such as “A”, “B”, “C”, etc., and the pharmacy worker places filled prescription orders in the appropriate bin corresponding to the first letter of a customer's last name. Typically, prescription orders for different customers having the same first letter of their last name are all placed in the same bin in random order. Accordingly, a pharmacy worker must sort through all of the prescription orders in a particular bin in order to find a particular customer's order. Sometimes, a pharmacy worker may inadvertently grab and distribute the wrong prescription order from collection of prescription orders in the bin, thereby compromising the safety of the ultimate taker of the prescription drug. The likelihood of such inadvertent distribution of a filled prescription to the wrong recipient is particularly increased where customers having the same or similar names are compiled in the same location in the will-call storage area.
More recently, some pharmacies have installed fixed will-call storage racks containing a plurality of relatively small bins therein. Each bin is provided with a unique identifier such as a number, and only one prescription order is placed in each bin. Accordingly, a worker can record which bin number a particular customer's prescription order has been placed into, and retrieve this information when the customer arrives to pick-up their prescription order, thereby facilitating easy retrieval of the customers' filled order from the identified bin without having to sort through other customer's filled orders in that bin.
While these types of systems facilitate locating and retrieving a customer's prescription order, they require a large number of individually-identified bins in order for a large pharmacy to have enough storage bins to accommodate its workload. Moreover, suitable worker passage ways must also be available to allow workers to access all of the bins. In practice, an effective quantity of bins and their related passage ways require a large amount of floor space. However, many pharmacies, especially existing retail pharmacies, frequently do not have sufficient floor space to accommodate an appropriate amount of bins effectively into an existing storage area.
Moreover, as the volume of prescription orders handled by a particular pharmacy increases and the related technology that allows pharmacies to fill these orders even quicker improves, pharmacies will require even more storage space in which to effectively place filled prescription orders awaiting customer pick-up.
In addition, known will-call storage areas are usually positioned adjacent to customer pick-up areas, and the contents of bins containing a first customer's prescription order awaiting pick-up in some known will-call storage devices can sometimes be viewed by other customers when picking up their own prescription orders. Accordingly, such devices can compromise the privacy of the first customer's medical information.